Jane Blonde Spylets Are Forever

By Jill Marshall

The past is calling, and Jane Blonde, Sensational Spylet, must travel back in time for her final showdown with the evil Copernicus. But everything works differently here, and she can’t even rely on her favourite gadgets and team-mates. Even for the sensational spylet, it's all impossible to BELIEV3 ... Can she follow the trail of clues to figure it out or is time up for Jane Blonde? Tick. Tick. Tick.

Originally published by Macmillan Children's Books, the Jane Blonde series has sold hundreds of thousands of copies in two dozen countries, featured as a World Book Day title, and has been optioned for film and TV. It is now available for the first time in all sorts of digital versions including e, flip and print books, with fabulous new covers and from its new official home - Jill Marshall Books Ltd.

The seven Jane Blonde books are also a SWAGG origin story so you don't have to say bye to Blonde. Meet Janey and the rest of her new team - Jack BC, Matilda Peppercorn, Stein - in the first of the S*W*A*G*G series, Spook.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jill Marshall
• Release date: May 5, 2020
• ISBN: 9781990024368

Jill Marshall

Jill Marshall is the author of the best-selling Jane Blonde series and fiction for children, young adults and adults. Her middle-grade series about sensational girl spy, Jane Blonde,published by Macmillan Children's Books UK, has sold hundreds of thousands of copies around the world, featured as a World Book Day title and reached the UK Times Top 10 for all fiction. Jane Blonde has been optioned for film and TV and is currently undergoing some exciting Wower-ish transformations.Jill has now brought Jane together with her other series in this age group - Doghead, The Legend of Matilda Peppercorn, Stein & Frank - in a fantastic new ensemble series. Meet the SWAGG team, and their first book, SPOOK.As well as books for tweens and teens, Jill writes for young adults and adults, each with a collection of three stand-alone novels. She also writes for younger children, with a Hachette-published picture book for teenies, Kave-Tina Rox.When she's not writing books, Jill is a communications consultant and a proud mum and nana. She divides her time between the UK and New Zealand, and hopes one day to travel between the two by SatiSPI or ESPIdrilles.

Book preview

JANE BLONDE

Spylets are Forever

By Jill Marshall

First published by Macmillan Children’s Books 2009

Copyright © Jill Marshall 2020

The right of Jill Marshall to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from

the National Library of New Zealand

ISBN 978-1-99-002436-8

Cover Design by Katie Gannon

Illustrations by Madison Fotti-Knowles

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Are we not drawn on, we few, drawn on to new era?

Chapter 1 Midnight mates

Janey Brown had been having a dream - a very nice one in which she was playing tennis with her dad. Boring, perhaps, to anyone else, but to Janey it had been the best dream ever. Her dad had been just that - a dad. Not a spy. Not an ever-changing personality who invented a pretend brother and then many different machines so he could live his extraordinary life. And definitely not someone who had turned himself into a hairy caveman and then lost himself in time. She sighed. Why did she have to wake up now?

Struggling out of bed, she peeped out of the window, wondering if it was the moans and howls of the ferocious gusts of wind outside that had woken her. A storm was brewing, although the day had been close and hot. An Indian summer - that was what her mum called the unusual autumn weather.

From the darkness appeared a face. ‘Aha!’ whispered Janey. So it wasn’t just the gale that had woken her. It must have been her spy instincts kicking in. Janey drew back behind the curtains, then moved alongside the window.

She’d been trained well. Surprise, surprise, surprise - the first rule of spying. G-Mamma had taught her that right back at the beginning. So instead of doing the obvious thing and looking through the crack in the middle of the curtains - risking being spotted - Janey hopped up on to the edge of her bed and peeked down through the narrow gap above the curtain rail. The face appeared disembodied, bobbing around in the alley behind the house like the moon on a stick. But that was only an illusion. The spy - for that was obviously what it was - was simply dressed in black so his body wasn’t visible in the darkness.

Furthermore, the spy was friend, not foe. Janey relaxed and twitched the curtain to one side.

What was Alfie up to? It was after midnight. And even though it wasn’t that unusual for Spylets like herself and Alfie to be galloping about the globe in the middle of the night, that was only when they were on a mission.

She watched as Alfie jumped over the back fence, catching his trousers on a jagged splinter. He dropped down, head swivelling left and right as he took in the details of the garden.

Janey opened the window. ‘Halo! What are you doing?’

Alfie stared back at her, his upturned face glowing in the moonlight. For a moment he looked terrified, then he grinned, holding up a scrap of paper that was nearly snatched from his hand by the wind.

‘What’s that? And what are you wearing?’ hissed Janey.

Janey only ever saw her best friend and Spylet buddy in one of three outfits: his school uniform, his denim-blue SPIsuit, or jeans and a sweatshirt. Oh, and occasionally his football gear. Right now he was sporting wide black trousers that billowed around his legs - no wonder they’d snagged on the fence - and a short V-necked black jumper that made him look taller and more gangly than usual.

Alfie glanced down at his clothes, then shrugged. Style was never that important to him. The little tornado behind him made his whole body quiver, and Janey tutted as she realised what he’d been up to. He’d been flying the Pet Jet. And he’d left the engine running, so much so that some sort of force was dragging him back towards it.

‘Hang on,’ whispered Janey. ‘I’m coming down.’

Moments later she eased open the back door and flitted silently into the garden. ‘Alfie, why didn’t you just. . . ?’

. . . SPIV me, she had been about to say. He could easily have contacted her on the SPI Visualator she always wore around her neck or kept on the bedside table at night.

But he wasn’t there. Janey pushed back the mousy hair that whipped around her face as the gathering storm grew more violent. Head down, she battled through the wind towards the back of the garden where Alfie had been standing.

Gone.

‘Alfie!’ said Janey crossly. She could have just stayed in bed. What was he mucking about at? The wheel of the Pet Jet was still spinning.

Maybe he was hiding. A glint of moonlight caught her eye as she looked for him behind the garage. When she had finally made up her mind that he wasn’t there, Janey braved the gusts of wind and foraged in the grass for whatever had gleamed.

It was a little glass ball, clear for the most part, with a curved sliver of coloured glass nestled at the centre. For a moment Janey wondered if it was one of G-Mamma’s sweets. She’d been living in the garage for a while, after all, and the ball could be a re-invented Malteser that had been through the Wower. But then she spotted a strand of black fibre attached to it.

‘Alfie’s.’ It had probably fallen out of his pocket when he’d caught his new black trousers on the rotting fence.

Well, I might just keep it, she thought. Serve him right for getting me out of bed on a hideous windy night. And Jane Blonde stomped her way across the garden and headed back to the warmth of her duvet.

The wind swooped and roared throughout the night, but with a pillow wrapped around her head Janey hardly heard a thing.

Chapter 2 Marble marvels

‘Don’t forget your English homework,’ called Jean Brown as she hurried around the kitchen, packing lunch boxes with one hand as she emptied compacted dirt out of the vacuum cleaner with the other. Janey wouldn’t have been at all surprised to find dust bunnies in her sandwiches instead of cheese and pickle.

‘I’ve put it in my bag,’ said Janey, whisking her lunch box out of her mother’s grasp. ‘And you should slow down.’

Her mum sighed. ‘I would love to. Honestly, with SPI and Clean Jean to manage, I’m finding it all a bit much.’ She slammed shut the little trap door on the vacuum cleaner. ‘But Uncle James is hovering more and more, asking me why I’m not putting one hundred per cent into the business - keeping his eye on the books and all that. I can’t really tell him it’s because I’m also looking after my missing husband’s spying organisation, can I?’

‘Suppose not,’ said Janey.

She felt rather like sighing herself. Not long after getting her father back at the end of their last adventure, he’d turned into a caveman and disappeared down the centre of one of his own gadgets, the Rapid Evolution machine called the R-Evolver. G-Mamma was half managing Solomon’s Polificational Investigations for Boz Brilliance Brown, Janey’s super-SPI dad, and helping out with the Clean Jean business, while Janey’s mum was trying to be big-boss Clean Jean, Gina Bellarina (super-SPI) and just plain Jean, mum of Janey, all at the same time. Everyone else had either vanished or was so busy that they might as well have gone too.

It seemed very unfair on her poor, overworked mum. ‘I don’t think Uncle James should be nagging you.’

Janey’s mum gave her a tight smile. ‘It is his job. Organising money - it’s all he cares about. But I probably need someone to keep me in check. Hold it all together. Just until. . .’

‘I know, Mum.’ Janey gave her mum a hug, trying not to cry. ‘We’ll find him. We’ll get him back. I promise.’

Jean just nodded, her face a bit wobbly, as Janey heaved on her heavy backpack and set off for school.

At least Alfie was his usual self. Possibly not even busy enough, judging by his midnight meanderings in her back garden. He got on the school bus two stops after her, and waved, but the aisle was too packed with giggling, gabbling schoolkids for him to join her. Janey nodded, then angled her hand towards her chest, index and middle finger in an inverted V. To any non- SPIs catching the signal, it would look as if Janey was attempting a sort of rapper greeting, but Alfie knew what it meant. She was pointing to the SPI-buy under her jumper. SPIV U later.

They needed their spy gadgets these days. It wasn’t anywhere near as easy for them to communicate at Everdenn School as it had been at Winton. They weren’t in the same form, and only came together once a week for music in the school hall. Janey always enjoyed those classes - for one, she was able to stand next to Alfie, and sometimes she could even help him with the dreadful wailing he called singing.

Besides that, she really liked the school hall. At one end stood a large stage from which the headmaster boomed out his pronouncements in assembly, and at the other hung long wooden boards detailing all the former students who’d been Head Girl or Boy, or gone on to get a university degree. Janey hadn’t been at all surprised to see the name Maisie Halliday, Alfie’s mum, picked out in gold lettering as a former Head Girl, with the exotic sounding ‘Jakobi Delacroix’ as Head Boy in the column beside her. Janey loved it all, as she loved the old grandfather clock in the foyer and the mysterious, creepy stairs leading up the headmaster’s office. The whole place had a sense of history, a feeling  of being where past and present met, and Janey felt as though she fitted in.

Tuesdays were easy - maths, science, music and PE. Even sports was better at Everdenn, although Janey suspected that might have something to do with the fact that she sneaked her Fleet-feet on under her socks. She had to wear extra big trainers to accommodate them, and the Fleet-feet didn’t work as well as when they made direct contact with the ground, but they allowed her to keep up with the rest of the class in cross-country and spring high enough to look naturally good at gymnastics. She’d even been put forward for the school athletics team for long jump, which had made quite a few people look at her differently.

Now, still glowing from playing hockey on the sports field, Janey jostled her way in next to Alfie as music class began and pressed the little glass ball she’d found into his hand.

‘Yours, I think,’ said Janey.

Shielding it from prying eyes, Alfie peeked down at the ball. ‘Oh,’ he said, surprised. ‘Thanks.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s a marble,’ said Alfie, pocketing it. ‘It was this game they played a million years ago when Mum was young, knocking out other kids’ smaller marbles and so on. She says she collected them. I reckon she just confiscated them off the other kids and kept them for herself.’

Janey grinned. ‘Well, I very nearly kept that one. You should be more careful.’

‘What did . . . ?’ started Alfie, but a frantic rattling of the music stand by the teacher stopped him in his tracks.

‘Halliday!’ snapped Mr Young. ‘There’s no Mummy Halliday for you to run to here, you know.’

‘Sorry,’ muttered Alfie, turning scarlet as people whipped round to look at him.

‘Detention after school.’

Janey almost winced for Alfie, but she managed to keep her face neutral. She knew only too well what it felt like to be singled out at school, and everyone staring only made matters worse. As soon as the teacher had turned away to rifle through his book, she made the SPIV U sign again and faced the front sharply. Alfie’s question - and hers - would have to wait. Meanwhile, she blocked off her hearing as Alfie proceeded to drone his way through ‘We Plough the Fields and Scatter’ and the school day ground to a close.

Her mum was still out when Janey got home, so she wandered up to G-Mamma’s Spylab, newly refurbished in shades of lilac, pink and white.

‘Ho there, Spygirl,’ called G-Mamma, knitting furiously, as Janey stepped off the SPIral staircase into the room.

‘Gosh,’ said Janey. ‘I would never have thought knitting would be your thing.’

G-Mamma sniffed. ‘Don’t look down your nose at arts and crafts, Janey baby,’ she said, frowning as she picked up a dropped stitch. ‘You’d be amazed what you can do when you’re good at dressmaking and a bit of the old crochet. Watch this!’

She cast off her knitting with a flourish, and Janey studied the straggly scrap of yellow wool hanging from her SPI:KE’s hand. ‘It’s for Trouble,’ announced G- Mamma, scooping up the Spycat.

‘Oh. Is it a . .